Lost? Don’t bother suing if your GPS fails.

Amiel Dabush was 40 minutes late to a business meeting in Aberdeen, New Jersey, and he blamed his tardiness on the failure of the GPS system in his $70,000 Mercedes S-Class to show him the way. Although he didn’t lose any money or business from being late to the meeting, Dabush must have been pretty ticked-off, because he filed a class action lawsuit against Mercedes under New Jersey’s Consumer Fraud Act.

Dabush claimed that Mercedes misrepresented the quality of the GPS system in its marketing brochure which claimed, among other things, that “[i]f there’s a road that goes there, the S-Class can show you the way.”

The New Jersey Court of Appeals affirmed the trial court’s dismissal of the lawsuit on summary judgment, finding that Dabush’s “asserted loss was based on an unreasonable expectation of what was ‘promised’ in the brochure – a perfect navigation system that would include data of all locations and provide directions no matter where he happened to be at a particular point.” Such an asserted loss, the court held, was not an “ascertainable loss” required to sustain a cause of action under the state’s Consumer Fraud Act.

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Evan Brown is an attorney in Chicago helping businesses and individuals identify and manage issues dealing with technology development, copyright, trademarks, domain names, software licensing, service agreements and other matters involving the internet and new media.

Evan is a partner in the law firm of Much Shelist, P.C. He is an adjunct professor of law at Chicago-Kent College of Law, and is a Domain Name Panelist with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).